Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.
— Trevor Paglen
I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.
I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective.
Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.
Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object.
One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it.
For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.
I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.
Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say.
In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race!
I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes.
How has the sky been transformed by drones? How has the ocean been transformed by the fact that over 90% of the world's information travels in underwater cables?
What I thought was fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they're going, and what it means to be alive on the planet.
I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them.
When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.
I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning - it's not a bug.
Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do.
I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.
Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.
When you look at the number of satellites, what they're doing and what they represent, it is really a vision of trying to have the world in your clutches.
For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.
Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it.
I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.
Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.
It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.
What started happening really quickly after 9/11 and the construction of this 'War on Terror' business is that I saw all kinds of parallels between the way that was being constructed and the way that prisons had been constructed since the early 1980s.
Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.
Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.
I think that a lot of us subconsciously would like to live in a world in which good things were beautiful and bad things were ugly. But that's not how the world works.
Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.
We humans have always looked to the sky as a sounding board for asking big questions about ourselves: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
I am not a journalist or an academic.
I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.
It's productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can't teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.
When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves?
Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible.
One of the kinds of things I'm consistently interested in is what the border between the seen and not seen is and the border between being able to perceive something and not perceive it.
We imagine going to the moon and planting a flag, going to an asteroid and mining, going to Mars and setting up a colony. And I think that expansionist mentality is very self-destructive, especially given the kind of precarious relationship we now have to the ecosystem here on Earth, because it allows us to imagine that Earth is disposable.
At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field.
American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.
Injustice drives me crazy!
What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?
I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.
Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world's information goes through little tubes under the ocean. Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.
I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky.
I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise.
The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.
